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Buondì.
The weather’s not pleasant in Italy right now.
It’s only eight a.m. yet there seems to be no point in opening bedroom windows – the outside air is as fuggy as the miasma within.
If you live somewhere cool then you won’t know this first-hand, but a quick glance at RaiNews.it would clue you in to what everyone here is talking about:
(headlines displayed below a photo of people passing a pharmacist’s LED temperature display)
Ondata di calore più lunga, durerà fino a luglio: è diretta a nord | È l’anticiclone più estremo | Blackout nel milanese | Stop cantieri, numeri verdi
Il clou al settentrione: cerchio rosso tra domenica 28 e lunedì 30 giugno. Esperto: “Il centro della massa di aria calda verso il Nord Italia”
– Le previsioni del tempo per mercoledì 24 giugno
– Caldo torrido in Francia, salgono a 40 i morti per annegamento
– Prosegue l’ondata di caldo sull’Italia: le temperature
– Bonus condizionatori 2026, detrazioni al 50%
Don’t read Italian so skipped it? Just couldn’t be bothered?
Learners of any level, even absolute beginners can benefit from scanning, at least, the headlines in a news app.
There are, for example, key words and phrases which – for a variety of reasons – make comprehension possible.
A few words are borrowed from English, which obviously makes reading/listening easier. The only examples I could find above are ‘blackout’ and ‘stop’, but they carry a lot of weight.
Apparently, so many airconditioners are running that infastructure’s failing. Blackout!
It’s so hot that there are toll-free numbers (see below) which you can call, to find out whether the construction site you or your loved ones are labouring on should be closed to protect workers from heatstroke. Stop! (‘cantieri’ = construction sites)
Many others have Latin origins which are shared with similar or identical ‘English’ words. For instance: numeri, esperto, centro, nord, torrido, massa di aria, temperature, bonus, condizionatori, detrazioni.
And though others might be unfamiliar, they could be guessable from the context: ‘calore’ sounds like ‘caldo’, don’t you think? The people in the picture certainly look ‘caldo’ (= hot, ‘ondata di calore’ = heat wave), ‘massa di aria calda’ = mass of hot air)
That said, even if you already know a good bit of Italian, there’ll likely be meanings that escape you for reasons of what I call ‘cultural knowledge’.
What Americans term a ‘toll-free number’ and Brits know as an ‘0800 number’, in Italy is called a ‘numero verde’ (publicised in a distinctive green font). That’s cultural knowledge.
You’d have a devil of a job guessing what ‘green number’ meant, if you couldn’t see one printed, in an understandable context.
And unless you own a home and file tax returns in Italy… Bonus condizionatori? Detrazioni? Those who do, though, might be attracted by the promised subsidies and tax savings.
For the grammar-fiends amongst you, there are some useful prepositional words and phrases to express ‘movement’ (news is all about movement/change, if you think about it).
I use ‘fino a’ (= until) all the time. There’s also ‘verso’ (= towards), ‘salgono’ (= they go up), and ‘prosegue’ (it continues/is continuing).
All that from just a glance at the headlines, on one single news story!
But that’s not really my point. News stories are particularly helpful for language-learning because what’s worth reporting on in one country/language is often also worth talking about elsewhere.
When I turn on Swedish radio, for instance, which I try to do each day, they’re talking about how hot it is in southern Europe (hello mum!), in Britian too (hello Daniel!), and what the likelihood is of extreme temperatures in Sweden.
The ‘Caldo torrido in Francia, salgono a 40 i morti per annegamento’ (= torrid heat in France leads to 40 drowning deaths) story is reported in Swedish, too. Along with updates on how many ‘foreign-born’ Swedes have died after leaping into the country’s many rivers and lakes to escape the heat.
I suppose in Syria people don’t insist their kids take swimming lessons, as native-born Swedes do. Tut tut.
See? Cultural knowledge, just lying there, waiting for you to pick it up. And when you have it, you’ll be able to interpret indirect references to the consequences of the previous decade’s immigration crisis.
Often it’s what’s NOT said that clues you in: “a nineteen year old man was shot to death in (grotty Stockholm suburb)” means an immigrant dealing drugs got killed by rivals.
If it had been some nicely-dressed college boy (possibly the customer of the teenager who got wasted), they’d have said so, to be sure.
Listen to talk radio station France.info and/or browse a French news app, and you’ll soon know the French words and expressions used to talk about heat waves, heat warnings, drownings, and so on. Plus how the French also never mention the ethnicity of crime victims…
Understanding what people are writing and saying in your OWN language might seem to you the natural result of the decades you’ve spent knowing and using it, and in part that’s true.
But native-English speakers should try, for instance, reading newspapers from another English-speaking country. People in the US could browse the British, Australian, South-African, Canadian, New Zealand, Irish press, and thus confirm just how much of what you read you have to guess at: words, expressions, ‘cultural knowledge’.
Sure, for a Brit reading newspapers from the USA (which I often do, as our library provides a free app), it’s just a fraction of the total that’s unclear overall. But that fraction can conceal some really big gaps!
Read/listen to sports news about a game that’s unfamiliar to you, for instance – let’s imagine USA club members who may not know much about ‘soccer’ but are patriotically trying to follow the World Cup, currently taking place in their country – and it’s soon evident just how much understanding is ‘cumulative’ so based on previous-experience, reaching a critical-mass of ‘knowledge’, and, above all, context.
I know lots about cricket, less above baseball (not enough to understand what’s going on) and nothing at all about hurling.
We briefly played cricket at school, and I went to one match, while visiting India. Baseball, I’ve seen in films. But – scratches head – hurling? No exposure at all, other than knowing that it exists. I had to check the spelling. Google seemed unsure, too.
Exposure provides context, context provides clues, clues allow you to hypothesise meaning, hypothesizing meaning gives you the chance to confirm your understanding (or non-understanding) of what you read or hear, and the end-result is progress, that’s to say knowing more about the world than you did before.
Here are a few words. What do they conjure up for you?
Gaza – Hormuz – Trump – Meloni
You may know relatively little about some of those, or quite a lot about all of them. Either way, your ‘understanding’ will be incomplete.
You can’t, by definition, know everything about any one of those words. But that’s fine, no problem at all. Just a tiny bit of knowledge provides a starting point for understanding news stories.
Turn on an Italian TV news broadcast, if you have access to one (otherwise, try radio, which isn’t usually geo-blocked: https://www.raiplaysound.it/ ) and it would be a fair bet that you’d hear stories about at least some of Gaza, Hormuz, Trump and Meloni.
See? You’re already off to a flying start!
Now, make reading/listening to news ‘in italiano’ a regular part of your learning, as I do.
Someone commented on an EasyItalianNews.com bulletin a while back
Non mi interessa tutte le notizie Americano. Sto imparando italiano così mi interessa le notizie italiano. Grazie
which is a common sentiment, but a very foolish one: “I don’t want to read about our president, even in Italian. Let’s have more cutesy stories about pizza and gondolas!
Stories about Italian politics, especially, but also business, sport, and culture news articles, tend to be written for those who already know what’s going on. The Italian press, largely, is written by insiders for insiders, rather than for the likes of you and I.
I’ve lived in Italy for closing on three decades now, yet can barely guess at a lot of ‘Italian’ news stories, other than crimes, accidents, disasters, and the like.
And given that there are only so many things you can write about handmade icecream and celebrity weddings, if EasyItalianNews.com only did ‘Italian’ stories, the bulletins would be either be boring and largely incomprehensible, or repetitively violent.
But anyway, what do you – citizen of elsewhere – think Italians are reading and talking about each day?
L’ondata di calore, Trump, Hormuz, i mondiali, and bonus condizionatori, of course.
Get clued in or get left out!
Alla prossima settimana.
‘La carriera – dietro le quinte del Palio di Siena’ 50% Off!
Ready for a challenge? Willing to take on all comers, and win, no matter what it takes?
Then check out our half-price, C2-level, ‘easy’ Italian reader ebook, ‘La carriera – dietro le quinte del Palio di Siena‘, which isn’t for the faint-hearted!
C2 is as hard as it comes, which still being ‘simplified’, so don’t expect an easy ride, so to speak.
E mancano solo quattro giorni al Palio, la corsa di cavalli più famosa d’Italia!”
sebbene la radio gracchiasse, si distinguevano piuttosto chiaramente le parole dell’esaltato commentatore: “Siena freme e si dipinge dei colori delle contrade, agghindate per la festa. Come ben sapete, cari ascoltatori, tra le dieci contrade che gareggiano vi sono alleanze e rivalità secolari. Per ogni contrada è stato già estratto a sorte un cavallo. I migliori di quest’anno sono il giovane Trifoglio, che è al suo secondo palio e corre per la contrada dell’Istrice, e la veterana Caruccia che vestirà i colori della Lupa. La Lupa e l’Istrice sono due storiche rivali, che fatalità, signori! Se ne vedranno delle belle!
Follow Il Guercio, a diminutive one-eyed Sardinian jockey, as he’s hired to ride one of the year’s best horses, bareback, in Italy’s most famous urban race, the Siena Palio!
As always, there’s Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) so you can get a better idea of the length, level and format of the material.
Save the .pdf on your computer, tablet or smartphone, or print it to study in the old-fashioned way. There’s a link to the online audio in the sample chapter – the whole story is available to listen to FREE online, so if you just want to work on your listening skills, you don’t need to actually buy the full version of the ebook (though it helps…)
Don’t forget, La carriera – dietro le quinte del Palio di Siena is 50% off the usual ‘easy reader’ price of £9.99, at just £4.99!
- .pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
- .ePub (Kindle-compatible) version available at no extra cost (just ask)
- 8 chapters to read and listen to
- Comprehension questions to check your understanding
- Italian glossary of ‘difficult’ terms (no English!)
- Suitable for students at upper-intermediate/advanced levels
- Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)
‘La carriera – dietro le quinte del Palio di Siena‘, just £4.99! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | Catalog
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